At early stage startups it happens a lot for the sake of time or just having worked with someone before if nothing else. I wouldn't necessarily be discouraged

At early stage startups it happens a lot for the sake of time or just having worked with someone before if nothing else. I wouldn't necessarily be discouraged by it as a lot of referrals are nothing more than "I met this person at meetups a couple times" which doesn't give them much of an advantage in the interview process — if anything it's a minor factor most of the time. The real leg up that these people have is knowing of new positions early or possibly before they're posted. The best thing you can do is network yourself and attend events where the people you want to work with go. If you are less social, you can find other ways to break into the scene like submitting pull requests and contributing code to projects that people in your field care about. Writing blog posts about the tech too. That kinda stuff doesn't go unnoticed.